New American Heritage Dictionary Adds “Anchor Baby”

Immigration has been one of the most explosive and divisive issues in politics in the past few years. Along with a few otehr issues (such as access to abortion services), the immigration debate has gotten a lot of play, and often the media does not play nice. One phrase in particular, however, has been repeated over and over, in an attempt to both demonize immigrants and dehumanize women: “anchor baby.” The phrase has been everywhere, implying that immigrants give birth to children in the U.S. as a quick and easy way to get citizenship for themselves. This is, of course, incorrect; the time frame of a U.S. citizen child of immigrants to reach the age at which they could petition their parents and then going through the process of petitioning is decades, and is not exactly easy or cheap. But because of the popularity of the phrase, the New American Heritage Dictionary added it to its next volume. However, the definition is the following:

anchor babyn. A child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members of their family.

Say what? Nowhere in the definition is there a mention that this is a pejorative and hateful term. The dictionary’s executive editor claims that they must remain objective even on politically charged words, but it seems a huge oversight to not include that this is in fact a term that is used to insult and demean. What do you think?

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“especially” should have been replaced with “pejoratively”. Failure to have done so glaringly reveals the editorial staff’s “whitebread” bias – a bias that’s really denial, foisted on the public as objectivity. Sigh…